Ubisoft's fairytale RPG is beautiful and diverting, but lacks the agency to be
considered a complete success, finds Tom Hoggins

Child of Light’s dream-like whimsy and painterly style may not be the type of thing you'd expect from the team behind the blockbuster bombast of Far Cry 3, but there is much to admire about Ubisoft Montreal’s keen embrace of an indie ethos. This is a personal project for director Patrick Plourde and writer Jeffrey Yohalem, borne of a desire to weave a Studio Ghibli-inspired fairytale they can play with their children. That Child of Light exists at all is a testament to them and Ubisoft’s willingness to experiment in the ever-burgeoning digital space. Though far from perfect, Child of Light is welcome and lovingly produced.

Its narrative follows Aurora, an impish, flame-haired princess of Austria, who falls into a cold, un-waking sleep. To all the world Aurora appears to be dead, but her spirit awakes in the mystic world of Lemuria, where she is tasked with finding the lost sun and moon in order for her to return to the grief-stricken King.

You’ll notice, even from screenshots, how beautiful Child of Light can be. It is built in Ubisoft’s proprietary engine UbiArt, which can theoretically take an artists’ work and render it playable. It shows, with wonderful hand-drawn 2D landscapes of sky-villages held aloft by balloons in a cerulean sky, run down fishing settlements and giant trees with thorny insides. Character models are similarly painterly, with monsters moving delicately across the environment like menacing paper cutouts.

Aurora stands out, though, she’s more vivid and graceful, her hair a rich-red that flows behind her as she walks and flies, tiny wings fluttering behind her back. She’s a great character, determined and spiky, with a air of haughtiness befitting a royal. Aurora travels Lemuria focussed on her goal, but helps out the denizens of the world on the way, slaying beasties with her over-sized sword and liberating villages stricken by the loss of their celestial elements. She will also amass a party of companions to aid her in battle.

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The game itself is a mix of 2D platforming and JRPG-style turn-based combat. Aurora traverses the environment, initially on bare foot before being granted the power to fly, avoiding traps and solving puzzles. It’s a gentle thing; the puzzles are simplistic and navigation easy with the penalty for bumping into hazards small. Aurora is accompanied by a sprite named Igniculus, a small ball of blue flame that can either be controlled by the right stick or by a second player. The main idea of the co-operative play is that a younger player can assist a parent or sibling as the invulnerable Igniculus, solving light-based puzzles and collecting orbs from the environment.

Igniculus also helps in battle. Child of Light’s combat system is an interesting thing that if explained in detail will likely sound more complicated than it is. At its heart though, it provides a transparency to turn-based battle, with a bar at the foot of the screen showing who is to attack next and the speed at which it will happen. You can interrupt slow attacks with quicker strikes, punting your enemies timer back, and can anticipate incoming attacks with a defensive move. Igniculus can flit around the battlefield, collecting orbs, healing allies and slowing down the monsters.

Its initially a fiddly exercise if you are playing on your own, trying to conflate Igniculus’s movements with your attack selection. But as you acclimatise you will find plenty of pauses in which to plan your movement and top up Igniculus’ limited action bar. It brings an energy to the combat that may have been lacking if it was purely turn-based, while the introduction of a simple scissors-paper-stone elemental system adds another layer.

But despite these efforts at depth, Child of Light’s combat remains a little too gentle. More experienced players will look to up the difficulty from the start, but even newcomers may find that the plethora of health potions and pauses to swap in new party members detach you too readily from the action. You level up after nearly every battle, dipping into a sprawling but tediously samey skill tree for each of your characters. You pause and pop a few points into strength or defense, before occasionally unlocking a new skill. To be generous with upgrades is a sound theory, but when the level up jingle is as frequent and the rewards as inconsequential as they are here, any sense of achievement can’t help but be dulled.

So as beautiful and pleasant it all is, the mind does have a tendency to wander during Child of Light. It’s not that it’s too easy, but that it lacks agency. That the traversal and combat is largely untroubling seems to be a conscious decision in order to welcome inexperienced players, but Child of Light doesn’t offer enough to offset that lack of investment. Ubisoft Montreal are keen to push you through its tale, told sparingly in text bubbles, but it doesn’t have the pull to keep you invested. Much of this is down to the prose, which is written in a frankly irritating rhyming sing-song. Occasionally it can be endearing, such as when talking with your Jester companion whose rhymes need to be corrected, but it sacrifices clarity and exposition for a trite attempt at style. It doesn’t work, which is a shame. Aurora’s journey has plenty to like; it cheerfully riffs on traditional fairytale motifs but Lemuria has a sense of place and singularity that is brought to life by that stunning artwork. And special mention must go to Coeur de Pirate’s wonderful, ethereal score.

As I played Child of Light for review, I found it to be a game that I wasn’t itching to play, but rather enjoyed myself when I did. A pretty, diverting yarn that I’m thrilled exists, but is perhaps a little too nice to recommend wholeheartedly.